Tissue products, such as facial tissues, paper towels, bath tissues, sanitary napkins, and other similar products, are designed to include several important properties. For example, the products should have good durability when wet, a soft feel, and should be absorbent. Unfortunately, however, when steps are taken to increase one property of the product, other characteristics of the product are often adversely affected. For example, during a papermaking process, it is common to use various resins to increase the wet strength of the web. Cationic resins, for example, are often used because they are believed to more readily bond to the anionically charged cellulosic fibers. Although strength resins can increase the strength of the web, they also tend to stiffen the web, which is often undesired by consumers. Thus, to counteract this stiffness, chemical debonders are commonly utilized to reduce fiber bonding.
Nevertheless, reducing fiber bonding can sometimes result in a substantial reduction in the wet-to-dry strength ratio of the tissue product. For example, ideally, the wet-to-dry strength ratio of a tissue product in the cross-direction, the weakest direction of the tissue product, would approximate 1.0 so that the strength of the tissue product is not substantially different when wet or dry. Unfortunately, however, the wet-to-dry strength ratio of most conventional tissue products is in the range of about 0.05 to about 0.15. Such a low wet-to-dry strength ratio means that the strength of the tissue product substantially decreases when the tissue product is wet. This is clearly undesired, particularly when the tissue product is used as a paper towel, for example, to absorb liquids. In addition, a debonded tissue product can sometimes possess individual airborne fibers and fiber fragments (i.e., lint) and zones of fibers that are poorly bound to each other but not to adjacent zones of fibers (i.e., slough). During use, certain shear forces can liberate the weakly bound zones from the remaining fibers, thereby resulting in slough, i.e., bundles or pills on surfaces, such as skin or fabric.
Thus, a need still exists for a soft tissue product that has good wet strength and produces low levels of lint and slough.